


an unwanted kindness

by galamiel



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 08:31:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2725751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galamiel/pseuds/galamiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He would wake screaming to find himself in unfamiliar surroundings--a warm, dark room, with a fireplace nearby, a soft bed with silk sheets and feather pillows, a room that was not at all his cold and bare bedroom at Vigil's Keep and a bed that was not his scratchy and hard cot. A face would hover over his and he would have no recognition of it, and he would scream Mahariel's name for seconds, minutes, hours, until he remembered the warmth and strength of Hawke's arms wrapped around him and sobbed into his lover's shoulder, begging forgiveness that was always freely given.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an unwanted kindness

He wasn't sure he would ever be able to forgive her.

It wasn't that he hated her--he didn't. Quite the opposite, in fact. She was his friend, and she has saved him from death at the hands of the templars more than once already. She had gifted him Ser Pounce-a-Lot and the secret smile that snuck onto her face every time she saw the cat was more than enough to warm his heart. She was like an older sister to him, or maybe a mother, despite the fact that he was several years older than she was. She was kind and quiet and gentle.

But she had not given him a choice with this. Well, he supposed she had, in a way, but he did not consider 'drink or die, or leave and probably die' to be much of a choice. She had filled the goblet and he had tipped it back and felt the filth slide down his throat.

She had watched him in silence, her expression impassive, dark hair falling loosely to her armored shoulders, softening her angular, tattooed face. Anders had barely known her at that point, but some part of him wanted so desperately for there to be a hint of pride in those amber eyes.

The last thing he remembered was his throat and chest burning, and her looking away from him as he fell, her attention focused on Nathaniel as he drank from the same goblet and the scene started all over again.

It hadn't been too bad, at first. There was always a niggling at the back of his mind, and when he asked about it, Mahariel explained that it was his attraction to the darkspawn.

"Attraction? I don't think anyone would want to get in bed with one of those, talking or not!" he'd said with a laugh, and the corners of her lips had turned up and she'd huffed out the barest breath of a chuckle.

"Think of it like a magnet," she had told him. "You are attracted to them and they to you, because of the taint inside of you. You can sense them, but conversely, they can sense you as well. It's a mixed blessing."

At first, the biggest problem had been that he was hungry all of the time. Anders had always been prone to eat as much as he could as often as he could; being a mage meant he often burned more energy than he acquired, and his body was quick to complain that it needed more, but now it seemed he was constantly ravenous. He could easily put away amounts of food that three or four normal men would have problem stomaching and hardly an hour later his stomach would be growling at him again, painfully pressed up against his spine.

Anders expected this to be a complication during missions, but to his surprise, Mahariel was a believer in snacks. She passed out flasks of water and journey bread with cold cheese and tough jerky the minute she heard one of her flock's stomachs starting to complain.

"You knew this would happen," Nathaniel had said once as they walked down the road to Amaranthine. The young nobleman was proving that he, too, could shed his manners and tear at his food in the same undistinguished manner as the rest of them, given that he was hungry enough.

"I went through the Joining, too, Nate," Mahariel replied. "Although, for some reason, people tend to forget."

Anders personally thought it was because she looked so young, but he wasn't about to say so, even if he had been able to get a word out from around the cheese he was stuffing into his mouth.

Nathaniel's brow creased, "Weren't you on the run?" he asked. "Grey Wardens were criminals in Ferelden--how did you manage to find enough food?"

Mahariel laughed and shook her head a little. "You aren't forgetting the Grey Warden part, Nathaniel, but you are forgetting something else nearly as important." Before he could respond, she quickened her pace to catch up to Sigrun, handing out more food to the grateful dwarf.

"What do you suppose she meant by that?" Nathaniel asked, mostly to himself.

"You forgot that she's Dalish," Velanna had finally spoken up, her voice sharp and disgusted as she moved past them as well.

Perhaps the worst thing about the Joining, and the one thing that made Anders wonder if he would have been better off with the templars, were the nightmares.

He had not been prepared for his first night, writhing in bed to dreams of darkspawn eating him, his flesh tearing away under their rotting teeth, blood pooling around him as he screamed in pain. He was not used to lurching out of his sleep in the middle of the night, sobbing and sweating, tangled in his sheets. He was no stranger to bad dreams, but nothing he'd had before compared to the horror that he endured every night after drinking from the cup Mahariel had handed him.

At first he tried staying up to stave off the nightmares, but after a day of walking and fighting he was generally too exhausted to force himself to and ended up slipping into a half-sleep. This was, ultimately, worse than a full dreaming state, for he knew where he was, but he could not stop the dreams from overtaking him. He would be sitting in a chair or on his bed and would be unable to move, to fight, as the darkspawn tore his intestines from his stomach, violated him in ways he had not thought possible.

Mahariel told him it was called sleep paralysis.

She had run into his room with her sword in her hand the first time he suffered from one of these episodes. She was dressed in her nightshirt and her hair was tangled from her sleep, but her eyes were clear and worried. When he'd finally come to himself, breathing heavily and unaware of the tears running down his cheeks, she'd knelt by his bedside and held his shaking hand, offering him as much comfort as she could.

"You never told me," Anders accused her, but the words were weak from his exhaustion and fear.

"No one tells anyone," she replied grimly, staring up at him. "How many recruits do you think we would have if we told them at the beginning that they would have dreams like these? That they would piss themselves in the night from nightmares, or be drawn towards suicide? The Wardens have enough casualties from the Joining as is, Anders."

"You have them, too, then?" the apostate asked, and he seemed so much younger than his years for these questions, despite his haggard and worn appearance.

Mahariel paused, pressing her lips into a thin line. "Sometimes," she replied. "Less so now than when I first Joined. I would have dreams--prophetic ones, sometimes--of the Archdemon."

"Before you killed him," it wasn't a question.

"And after I killed him," her eyes sought his and she gave him serious look. "The Archdemon is never truly gone, Anders. The darkspawn are constantly searching out the Archdemons, to lead them in the Blights. That is why we are here."

"That is why we piss ourselves from nightmares," Anders tried to make light of the situation, but his heart was still pounding in his chest and his legs were still shaking, and the joke was weak, falling emptily from his lips.

If it had been the only episode of sleep paralysis he had ever had, Anders might have been able to forgive Mahariel for handing him that cup. She was caring, looking after him and waking him from nightmares to comfort him and soothe him with a familiar face, a familiar voice.

But it wasn't.

It happened for weeks, months, years. He remembered waking from one episode and near falling out his bed, scrambling down the hallway half tangled in his nightshirt and his blankets to pound on Mahariel's door, pressing his face into her stomach when she opened it, sobbing into her clothing like he was a babe and she was his mother. He remembered her kneeling, gathering him into her arms and trying to comfort him, he remembered lying in her lap one night while she sang to him in elvish, words he could not understand but held comfort.

He remembered her doing the same for the other new Wardens, letting Nathaniel weep into her shoulder after he woke screaming about his father, reading to Sigrun to help calm her, holding her forehead to Velanna's and speaking in rapid elvish.

And then Mahariel left.

The new Warden-Commander of Vigil's Keep was not kind, was not patient. He took away Ser Pounce-a-Lot, limited mealtimes, and offered no comfort when his crop of Wardens suffered nightmares.

As time progressed the nightmares came less often, but they did not lessen in intensity. He still woke screaming, expecting a tattooed face to hover over his, brow furrowed with worry, thin lips pressed tightly together. Even as the years passed and he began to forget her face, her voice, some part of him still expected her to be there.

He would wake screaming to find himself in unfamiliar surroundings--a warm, dark room, with a fireplace nearby, a soft bed with silk sheets and feather pillows, a room that was not at all his cold and bare bedroom at Vigil's Keep and a bed that was not his scratchy and hard cot. A face would hover over his and he would have no recognition of it, and he would scream Mahariel's name for seconds, minutes, hours, until he remembered the warmth and strength of Hawke's arms wrapped around him and sobbed into his lover's shoulder, begging forgiveness that was always freely given.

He was not sure he could ever forgive Mahariel for that unwanted kindness.


End file.
